Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) are integral to the promotion of human rights in their communities and in fostering regional stability. However, WHRDs often face violent repercussions for their work—including physical attacks, death threats and assassinations. The danger faced by WHRDs is particularly acute in Mesoamerica, where there were 1,375 reported attacks against WHRDs in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala between 2012 and 2013. When assessing how to protect WHRDs, it is important to understand their unique vulnerabilities, which stem from their gender and the subject of their advocacy efforts.

Despite a strong normative international legal framework, available regional protection mechanisms through the Organization of American States(OAS)and the nascent development of national laws, Mesoamerican WHRDs work under perilous conditions while their persecutors operate with impunity. While it is the primary responsibility of States to protect WHRDs,the United States has a legal and moral duty to assist this vulnerable population when their own governments are perpetrators of the abuse or fail to provide protection from attacks. This duty arises from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and its progeny, which embody principles of binding customary international law, as well as the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which represents the government’s express commitment to empower women around the world as agents of peace and stability.

This publication also contains the first UN document to focus on gender-based killings, the 2012 report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo, to the Human Rights Council. In response to the presentation of this report sixty four states issued a statement that member states “must exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators”.

The aim of this publication is to inform practitioners, Member State representatives, NGO workers, legislators, prosecutors and any other relevant actors who can contribute to putting an end to femicide. With this information about the diverse campaigns, we hope that efforts can be combined and strengthened to end this hideous crime once and for all.

WHO and PAHO have developed a series of information sheets on violence against women that summarizes what is known about the prevalence, patterns, consequences, risk factors and strategies to address the different forms of VAW. This series is for programme managers, practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and others working in a wide range of sectors and in every country.

Can be located by downloading zip file of the 34th assembly, document "AoD34-Doc13.08[EN].pdf"

Until 1992, the term femicide was used in the press and society to refer colloquially to the killing of women. In that year, Diana Russell and Jill Radford imbued the concept with legal and social content in their text Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing, defining it as the murder of women, by men, because they were women.They developed the term to refer to the gender-based motives behind the deaths of women at the hands of men: attempts to control their lives, bodies, and/or sexuality, to the point of punishing with death those who did not accept such subjection.

Subsequently, Marcela Lagarde took Russell and Radford’s notion of femicide and developed it as feminicide, rather than femicide, which would become the literal translation. For Lagarde, while femicide means the killing of women without specifying the causes of such deaths, the term feminicide lends itself better to covering the gender-based reasons and social construct underlying such deaths, as well as the impunity surrounding them.Lagarde uses the term feminicide in analyzing the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

However, at the international level, the terms feminicide and femicide are being used indistinctly to refer to the same problem, although in the case of the Caribbean, no such disagreement exists and only the term femicide is used.

Moreover, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) adopted the term feminicide in 2007, in the case of Bolivia, based on discussion in the “In-depth study on all forms of violence against women” of the United Nations Secretary-General, who also refers to this problem as feminicidio [in Spanish, but the English version uses only femicide – tr.].4/ Prior to that, the IACHR referred to this problem as murder of women, and expressed its concern by convening a thematic hearing on this problem (2006). The IACHR has admitted four cases on murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.